Leaven Disciples
A Discussion of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World
by Hunter Baker
In the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer brought his knickers and chin beard to America for memorable discussions about Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and How Shall We Then Live? Since that time, conservative Evangelicals and Catholics have been working hard to develop a solid Christian worldview and to advance the kingdom of Christ in the broader culture by redeeming its values. Living within recent memory of a time when things like divorce, abortion, and living together were widely considered shocking and scandalous, Christians over the past four decades have labored toward restoration with the sense that a better past was not too far in the rear-view mirror to be recovered.
Perhaps because that recovery seemed tantalizingly close at times, those of us in the movement may have failed to notice that, although the years when a more Christian lifestyle was normative were not so far in the past, it had indeed been a long time since the most important intellectuals and cultural institutions had been meaningfully faithful. It is this difference between the appearance of culture and the identity of the drivers of culture that drives the analysis of Christian reform gone wrong set forth by James Davison Hunter in To Change the World.
The book is broken up into three large essays. The first essay begins provocatively by asserting that the Christian account of changing the world—holding the right values, thinking Christianly, having courage—“is almost wholly mistaken.” Hunter has noticed that the influence of the Church—after reaching a high point of prestige and influence in the early nineteenth century—has been declining for 175 years. The decline has occurred despite the efforts of tens of millions of enthusiastic Christians in America to transform the culture. At the same time, two groups with far smaller numerical bases, Jews and homosexuals, have made gigantic strides in developing their own cultural influence and power.
Why is it that numerically dominant Christians have lost influence, while much smaller, niche groups, like Jews and homosexuals, have been able to radically increase their power to shape culture? The answer, according to Hunter, is that Christians have misunderstood the levers of change. Christians have assumed that ideas alter history and that a sufficient effort to get certain ideas into circulation will move the world. As a sociologist, Hunter argues that cultural formation is largely the result of institutions, structures of power, and networks of influence.
While Christians have created some impressive institutions in places like Colorado Springs, Wheaton, and Waco, these places cannot confer the same kind of power as New York or Los Angeles. In other words, Christian institutions, publications, and creations of popular culture emanate from what Hunter calls the periphery rather than the center. And the center is where the real power and symbolic capital are found.
Though Hunter does not say as much, one suspects that the left’s great desire to marginalize and undercut Fox News as a media organization stems from the fact that Fox operates out of New York as a non-conforming major player in a business once owned and operated almost completely by a particular kind of elite sensibility. Fox thus gives conservatism a platform in the center of media power. This is something that Christians do not have, and do not have any near-term prospect of possessing.
So we have our Books and Culture and our Christianity Today emanating from Wheaton, Illinois, but neither can compare with the influence of The New York Times Review of Books or The New Yorker. Interestingly, Hunter singles out First Things (created and published in New York) as the one seriously Christian entity to achieve significant influence among elites. (Then again, even First Things is an order of magnitude below anything like the joint dream of Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry to build a world-class Christian university in the Big Apple.)
The overall point here is that while Christians have built strength on the periphery, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as being able to apply leverage at the center. And the center is important because that is where real power lives. As much as we want to extol the grass roots and populism, real cultural change (in Hunter’s account) works from the top down and is driven by elites (often alternative elites) who are able to penetrate the highest and most concentric of social circles. The formula is to create overlapping networks of elites working together with great persistence in various spheres of culture.
Hunter Baker , J.D., Ph.D., is the dean of arts and sciences at Union University, a fellow of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and an affiliate scholar of the Acton Institute.
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